Posts tagged alphabet

If you’re literate in any language with a Latin script then you’ve learned your ABCs. Good job, considering it’s a completely random ordering of elements. The English alphabet is taken from the Roman script, which itself was taken from earlier Greek scripts that go back a good 3000 years to the Phoenicians. No one has a half-way plausable theory as to why that order was decided upon, but it’s hardly changed since the earliest records, except for when a language added, modified or removed a character.

Although it has a venerable history there isn’t much of a system about it. In this respect the Devanagari alphabet is a much more elegant system. This alphabet was set up in the 11th century by Sanskrit grammarians who based it on phonetic principles. Check out the chart below from Ancient Scripts:

We start off with the vowels, but it’s the consonants where the fun is. We start with the velar position, and move through voiceless (aspirated and not), voiced (breathy and not) then nasal. Move your way though the mouth from back to front as you go down the alphabet - you’ve got your alveo-palatal affricates, then your retroflexed, alveolar and bilabial stops before your grab-bag of approximents and fricatives.

Devanagari script and modifications of it are used throughout India, Nepal and Tibet. Even if you don’t use the script you can’t help but admire it.

Alphabets aren’t usually the territory of linguists. Occasionally when documenting a language with no literary tradition a fieldworker might have to help the community develop an alphabet, but as a general rule linguists aren’t too concerned with the written form. The more you think about a sound system though, the more you realise that the English alphabet really isn’t up to scratch. 

It’s useful to not change vowels, because they vary greatly between dialects. But when you actually think about the sound system the alphabet is rather lacking. This is largely because English has more sounds than letters, and so we resort to using digraphs - that is, two letters to represent one sound.

So the sound at the start of “thistle” and “thank God it’s Friday” is a single sound but it uses the two letters “t” and “h.” When linguists talk about this sound we don’t use “th” we use θ - known as “theta” - known as “theta” (it might look familiar to Maths or Greek fans).

The “th” digraph isn’t even only used for one sound, it’s used for two! It is also used when the sound is voiced (put your hand to your throat, feel how it buzzes when you say “these” but not when you say “thistle” - that’s voicing!). In fact, English did have a separate letter for this sound - it was this little fella þ called “thorn” - it survived all the way though to Middle English, although by that point it looked more like a “Y” - which is why you see things like “Ye Olde Shoppe.” It’s really “þe Olde Shoppe!” Now days linguists use ð ”eth” instead of thorn for this sound.

Other digraphs include “ng” which is only used at the end of words in English but could be replaced by ŋ ”engma” or the “sh” sound which could be replaced by ʃ ”esh“ 

I’m not the first person to point out some possible changes, not by a long shot. As far back as Benjamin Franklin there have been various efforts to jazz up the alphabet.

It’s unlikely that even the most logical changes to an alphabet will ever occur. People are very passionate about the alphabet, as seen in Vietnam when several government departments wanted the alphabet expanded to include F, J, W and Z (as mentioned in our August Link-o-rama, and over at Johnson). The request was denied.